Fort Scott — restoring Presidio's hidden gem

A visit to Fort Winfield Scott in the Presidio shows how far this unique national park has come in the past 20 years. It also shows how uncertain the final portion of the journey will be.

There’s a ghostly aura not found elsewhere in the Presidio, where more than 300 historic buildings have been restored since the Army transferred the 1,491-acre site to the National Park Service in 1994. A horseshoe of stocky Mission Revival barracks fronts a bedraggled but beguiling parade ground. A stockade sits vacant. A small officers’ club from 1921 is all but engulfed in vegetation.

All that could change now, as Fort Scott is the focus of a development competition that seeks “a large and sophisticated mission-driven organization” to restore the 30-acre landscape and its 22 historic structures. In September, the Presidio Trust’s board of directors is expected to select finalists who will then craft full proposals “to create a place for change in the world,” to quote the competition guidelines.

The three leading contenders, as judged by Presidio staff, all are strong. The board can enlarge the list by including one of the six teams that competed but fell short. But none of the competitors is as compelling as the setting, at least not yet — a reflection of how difficult it is to live up to expectations set far in the past.

A hallway inside an original barracks building tagged for renovation at Fort Scott in the Presidio of San Francisco. (Jessica Christian / The Chronicle | San Francisco Chronicle)

Six additional major projects in the Presidio

Since the Presidio became a national park in 1994, its rejuvenation has ranged from the restoration of native habitats to the rebirth of historic buildings. But there’s more to be done — and here are six projects in addition to Fort Scott that involve the built and natural worlds.

The three finalists show the range of ambitions for the old fort, which was completed in 1912 and was a command post independent from the Presidio until after World War II.

The mission of one proposal is contained in its name: the Epicenter for Climate Solutions, or EPIC. It would be led by Tom Dinwoodie, the former head of SunPower Corp. and now active with the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit devoted to the pursuit of what its website calls “a clean, prosperous and secure low-carbon future.”

“It took me about a nanosecond to see that this would be an ideal campus for nations of the world to address climate solutions,” said Dinwoodie, who is part of a team that includes Orton Development and the private California Clean Energy Fund. “There are virtual platforms right now, but no physical center for convening.”

OpenAI, another finalist, would tackle a much different issue — the perils and potentials of artificial intelligence. The nonprofit’s sponsors include such Silicon Valley heavyweights as Tesla founder Elon Musk, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

Its mission is to ensure that artificial intelligence, described in its proposal as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work” is pursued in a way that “benefits all of humanity.” The proposal, made with Kilroy Realty Corp., would restore several barracks to house staff and researchers, while others might be used for robotics research or academic conferences.

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The third finalist is the World Economic Forum, which hosts the annual Davos leadership conference and teamed with Equity Community Builders to propose “The Campus for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

It’s a concept that tries to put the breakneck pace of urban innovations — good and bad — into a larger cultural context. If the term is unfamiliar, then you weren’t present when Salesforce founder and Davos regular Marc Benioff emphasized it at last November’s Dreamforce conference.

There were other intriguing proposals, such as one from an East Coast team that would have focused on training veterans to work in the construction trades. But the three finalists are the ones that, according to Presidio Trust staff, merge grand visions with financial depth.

The parade ground at Fort Scott is now a mixture of native and invasive plant species. (Jessica Christian / The Chronicle | San Francisco Chronicle)

The estimated cost of redeveloping the site is at least $200 million.

“One of the challenges is that Fort Scott is a massive preservation project, the landscape as well as the buildings,” said Jean Fraser, the trust’s chief executive officer. “We want the very best thinking for this remarkable space.”

The Epicenter has echoes of the vision contained in the Presidio’s 1994 master plan — a document with a starry-eyed tone that shows how much our world has changed:

“Long the guardian of the Golden Gate, the Presidio now stands ready to house a network of national and international organizations devoted to improving human and natural environments and addressing our common future,” declared the plan released by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, of which the Presidio is a part.

Then, terms like “climate change” and “greenhouse gases” were still novel. The USSR had dissolved in 1991, and pragmatic liberalism seemed on the rise. Donald Trump had recently sold his yacht to save one of his bankrupt Atlantic City casinos.

Now Trump is president. He scoffs at elites and embraces the slogan “America First,” last used by isolationists before Pearl Harbor. He also has declared his intention to pull the U.S. out of the international Paris Climate Agreement.

In other words, the times are more fractious than when boosters conceived of the Presidio as “a new and permanent installation serving a peaceful world.”

The creators of this year’s proposals exude a confidence that they can nudge communities and continents toward a safer and sane world — oblivious to the fact that plenty of people now view tech titans or proponents of global cooperation with distrust.

This isn’t to denigrate the teams, all of which are solid and know the local terrain.

The World Economic Forum already leases space in one of Fort Scott’s restored buildings, while Equity Community Builders and design firm Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects have worked in the Presidio since the park’s early days. Orton Development and Marcy Wong Donn Logan Architects on the Epicenter team are restoring buildings at Pier 70 in San Francisco. Kilroy, the developer for OpenAI, has selected a preservation architect that’s an old hand in the park, Page & Turnbull.

Any of these teams, at least on paper, has the resources to take on a makeover that meets the meticulous standards of a National Historic Landmark District. All three include a new transit center and public trail extensions as part of the deal.

At the same time, the Presidio Trust doesn’t need to rush to make a decision.

The trust reached financial self-sufficiency in 2013, a timeline imposed by Congress, and since then has flourished. Look no further than the Main Post: the Officers’ Club was restored with a spacious museum in 2014, and a one-time guardhouse now holds a visitor center. Last month, a boutique hotel with nightly rates that start at $275 opened in a statuesque former barracks.

The long-closed Officer’s Club at Fort Scott in the Presidio of San Francisco. (Jessica Christian / The Chronicle | San Francisco Chronicle)

Ultimately, the trust’s board has the option to decide that not one proposal measures up to Fort Scott’s potential. That would be similar to what happened in 2014, when a prior board turned down George Lucas in his bid for a museum facing Crissy Field.

Another option is to combine elements of various proposals. The trust hinted at this in last week’s staff report on the competition — suggesting that “Fort Scott is a large property that can accommodate multiple uses.”

Fort Scott indeed is large. And it’s like no place else in the Bay Area. It would be wonderful to see life return to the quiet terrain. But whatever happens needs to be done right.